Lynne Reid Banks was one of the very first female TV news reporters. Photograph: Collect

The BBC is very good at period drama – world-famous for getting the details right. But judging by The Hour, its drama serial based on television news in the 50s, they can only do it if the period is far enough in the past so that nobody now living remembers it.

I remember the mid-50s well. It was when my life changed, and I left acting to become one of the first female television news reporters in the UK. This was in 1955, when ITV came along to challenge the BBC's monopoly and revolutionised the industry.

Younger people imagining The Hour to be a true representation of how TV news looked and worked at that time – supposing it to be the TV news equivalent to Mad Men – risk being seriously misled. The devil is in the detail, and pretty well every detail is wrong. The setting, the characters, their roles, their accents – most of us spoke with plums in our mouths – not to mention their clothes and hairstyles. Even the telephones and typewriters are wrong. (A portable typewriter? Even ITN, shamefully underfunded though we were, wasn't that poor.)

I realise they've gone for yet another murder mystery. But I could not prevent myself thinking how much more interesting, and original, and long-lasting would have been a carefully researched series about the excitements of television news in that period.

The 50s in general are written off as a boring decade following the turmoil of the second world war and its immediate aftermath – the postwar Labour government, the cold war, the arrival of the New Look in fashion, etc. But I remember it as a very exciting time – a pioneering, rule-breaking time, especially for the young. We "girls" – young women – flew the nest early, created our own lifestyles and set our own moral compasses, built serious careers, travelled and, in general, refused to go back to the prewar norm of being good little wives and mothers.

Nor was the 50s devoid of news. The Hour has brought in Suez and the Hungarian uprising. But to hold the audience, there would be little need to stray from our newsroom – a spacious one, not the cramped walk-in wardrobe the staff of BBC news appeared to be jammed into. It was a perpetual hive of activity as crises, world, local and very local (I mean our personal lives), came and went on a daily basis.

Our editors were gods. We never saw them unless summoned to their sanctum for instruction, praise or blame. With his many vagaries, Freddie, the correspondent played by Ben Whishaw, wouldn't have lasted 10 minutes at ITN, and in any case seems to think he is a Fleet Street hack going out after a story on his own – unheard-of. We got our assignments from the news editor and never left the building without a camera crew.

Our "newscasters" – men such as Robin Day, Chris Chattaway and Reggie Bosanquet – were personalities in their own right. If The Hour was the BBC circa 1956, the newsreader should have been wearing a dinner-jacket. That was something else we did away with, along with their po-faced delivery.

I must stress, because a lot of people won't credit it, that it was revolutionary in those days for women to be seen onscreen in news programmes, and we "girl reporters" – there were just two of us – became minor celebrities. Admittedly we didn't read the news – that was five years away. But we did pioneer new techniques of interviewing, including the vox-pop, where we buttonholed people in the street for their opinions (much to their alarm, at first – they thought we were trying to pick them up. Later we'd be mobbed by people avid to be on telly). We also forged intrepidly through strike-mobs, covered disasters, met VIPs in all fields, attended first nights (my speciality was showbusiness) and brought real people as well as the famous into the audience's living rooms. (I called these sort of stories, which mainly fell to my lot, "Mother-of-10-in-a-council-house".)

So the element of feminism and female intrusion into the male realm of TV news was a vital period indicator. What have we in The Hour? Well, there's the butch Martha Gellhorn character on the foreign desk and there's producer Bel. I'm sorry to dwell on appearances, but what is Bel wearing? Our one female producer, Di Edwards-Jones, a dynamic and motor-mouthed Welshwoman, wore whatever came to hand and would make a superb key character in a real story about the time. I, on camera sometimes twice a day, wore neat, unshowy two-pieces with full skirts, not hip-hugging dresses – try clambering in and out of camera-trucks in those, and besides, I wasn't paid enough (I got £1,000 a year, and, no, it wasn't as much as the men got).

As for the hairstyle, I was expected to shell out for regular visits to the Knightsbridge salon of Mr Teasy-Weasy to get my bubble-cut and my blond tips and streaks. Page-boy hairstyles, flopping across the face or not, went out with Veronica Lake.

We were more than just rivals to the then stuffy, reverential BBC. We were dragging them in our wake, revitalising their approach as they saw how popular we were. If today's BBC had not been bent on a thriller, what a wonderful drama they could have made about ITN, in all its brave newness. We had leading men of film-star calibre in the likes of Ludovic Kennedy, Ian Trethowan and Huw Thomas. And among the subs and cameramen, enough characters to keep a series going for years. As for the reporters, dare I suggest that one based on me might have added a certain sparkle, not to mention some comic relief? Benny Hill once honoured me with a sketch in which I was sent up as eager-beaver "girl reporter Linseed Cranks". Being naive – another period indicator – I was given to wonderful boo-boos such as innocently asking the wife of the Swedish ambassador if her husband had big balls. ("Give, dear! Or throw!" my hilarious colleagues shouted at me for a week.)

Those were the days. Much more interesting and marvellous than the gallimaufry of errors and fudgings that constitutes The Hour. Those early days were important and I want them guarded, not misrepresented.